My step sways to the left as I edge Delancey Street. My palm raises to the sky as if I was begging for forgiveness but truly, “Taxi!” I mumble the address, withdrawn into myself, could have been anywhere. Jittery fingers are blasting poorly typed confessions into my smart phone.

Lock the door. Brush my teeth. His breath is so melodic when he sleeps. Clothes fall off. My patch is unruly but I am too twisted to care. I curve my spine around him and it begins in no time.

He. He becomes my meat. Vegetarian and famished. His body is plentiful. Gnawing on forearms, bulky. Storing muscle for my teeth, sharp as winter, my growls are begs, I want to consume him.

My thighs sting from self-afflicted scratches. I learned earlier that evening that dancing is so much better when there is infliction. Guess I’m a sucker for over-stimulation. Heart racing in my mouthfuls. Okay. Yes. I am alive.

I grab onto his. Glad he doesn’t stop. Take more of him into my mouth, this time I don’t bite. Things are crecendoing but I still get bored. I jerk my head to his thigh and bite him again.

He pushes my head away and pins me down tight.

It is mostly good. We are mostly there. In that moment. Thoughtless but impulsive. The ends to each others urges. That’s what makes it good. That’s the “secret”– Cosmopolitan Feature Story:

Be the only ones in the room.

Don’t Filter.

Primal but intimate.

In the shower the next morning we counted the tattoos my jaw gave him. “I haven’t been out that late in months– a year?” I say as I scrub him down. “I feet immortal and carnivorous when I’m breathing in Manhattan’s night. Can I drop the V word? I think that everything will click again when I get that freedom on the regular dosage. Some sort of alive.”

My sexuality is: label-my-sexual-orientation-and-I-will-mangle-that-label. It is safe to just say sexually fluid though that is description is so vague and overused that it is basically meaningless. That’s why I add suffixes to my sexual-fluid label.

Sexual fluid, like gender fluid, means however I feel in one moment doesn’t define my entire self. How aroused I am by submission, bdsm, masochism, trans* individuals, cis individuals, phallus genitals, vaginal genitals, anal sex, vaginal sex, age play, etc is not a static experience. Even an evaluation of my sexual history will only give someone a glimpse of my sexual preferences because it is not filled with experiences that match the ideal. The ideal would be to have a girlfriend and have gay sex. Maybe even a lesbian triad. However, those aren’t my experiences — my experiences are mostly straight.

I have a boyfriend that I am in love with. And some of my best sex has been with him. This, plus similar experiences, proves that I am not a lesbian. Despite this, I feel like part of me is missing without that lesbian relationship that is in my ideal. This incompleteness in my relationship is what opens me up to polyamoury.

Kink is technically the sexual attraction to anything other then vaginal sex. But that definition reeks of homophobia and misogyny. When I say kink I am talking about sexual attraction to anything to other then sex with genitals. For me that’s bondage and restraint, sadism and masochism, dominance and submission, age play and pet play, and all the other tropes. For a long time I defined my sexual orientation purely in terms of kink. The gender and sex of my partner wasn’t important as much as their role as a Top. Since I started switching and being more grey in my power role that’s no longer true. But kink is still a large part of the way I relate to the sexual world.

Lesboqueer is a cute nickname I just made up. I’m sure other people have thought of it as well but it just came to me. Alternatives to lesboqueer would be: pansexual, homoflexible, or lesbian (alternatively: i’m a lesbian just a really bad lesbian). I have used all these descriptors as well.

Pansexual is way more preferable to bisexual. Bisexual would be dumbing down my sexuality too much. However, even pansexual isn’t a complete truth. I am sexually attracted to genders that are not in the gender binary however I am not equally attracted to all genders, I am unsure if I am attracted to all genders, and

My sexuality is: Any excuse to use the genderqueer seahorse icon.

gender does play a large part in my sexual orientation. I am far too interested in women for me to earnestly call myself pansexual.

The issue I have with homoflexible or lesbian is that it defines my gender as female. This is something I’m increasingly distancing from. Especially in my own cognition. In my mind I don’t want to box my own gender. Let it be free at least there.

Lesboqueer is basically a way for me to call myself a lesbian and genderqueer at the same time. But having a prefix of sexual fluid means I’m not really a lesbian all the time. And that’s how I solved the logic problem of my sexual orientation. Check, mate!

I only lasted eight months in the kink scene before I called it quits, two years ago. I mean, I have gone out a couple of times since, and kept in contact with my close friends, and like I occasionally lurk fetlife.com (the kink social network. Yeah we have our own. ) but that’s far from active. And I didn’t replace the scene with something new, I am back to my roots, to my true self… which is introversion. For me, it wasn’t the bdsm that was the experiment, it was being social four times a week.

I joined the scene because I was in a secret M/s polyamorous relationship for three years and couldn’t handle the loneliness that comes with such a huge secret. Though my vanilla (non-kink, like Muggles) friends were rebels, I still felt too weird to be relatable. But when I joined the scene I surpassed my need to be accepted for bdsm and poly. I found acceptance in my sex-positive feminism, trans* gender fluidity, and homosexuality too.

I had complete acceptance and support and love and attention. It gave me a special elation that I don’t expect to find again. I was infatuated, more so with the entire kink scene than anyone in particular. I would proudly say that I was dating the kink scene, that I was the kink scene’s lover, that everyone was beautiful and nothing can go wrong — until reality hit.

I left the scene because . . .

(A) The conversations bored me. If you aren’t in the scene, then maybe conversations about orgies, being cut open, being a sex slave, and starting porn work might seem endlessly exciting. Well, sorry, but these conversations actually aren’t that great. At some point I think, what about the rest of the world. There are only so many conversations on what it means to be a sub one person can take. These conversations made me closed off from meeting new people and more interested in learning the real meaty stuff from the friends I already made.

(B) I realized I willingly invited a rapist into my apartment to have sex with me without even knowing his name. Two years ago, when I quit, there was a major outing happening on Fetlife over community rapists. I entirely support this movement however Fetlife’s admins and moderators do not. There is still a conflict going on between Fetlife and the NYC kink scene over the outings. In one of the outings this particular kinkster was mentioned multiple times and I became rightfully horrified. Even if he never came over, I still would of been disturbed. I learned in these outing that there are many abusers that float around the scene. Realizing this sorta ruined my free-love idealism.

(C) Heartbreak. I have had the same conflicts come up multiple times in my different relations leading to some serious hurt feelings. Though I call it heartbreak, I am not just talking about my ex-romantic relationships. I am talking about other partners and friends as well. There are some really unhealthy habits in the nyc kink culture. People try to have as many partners as possible, often retiring their old partners when they find something new and shiny. Besides being a gross thing to do to someone, this is dangerous behaviors. Hard limits are frequently forgotten and real connections are forced, leading to some really awful scenes. The binge-eating on scene partners comes from a complete misunderstanding over what polyamoury really means (loving multiple people). The scene degrades this word to excuse their hook up culture with a pretentious-intellectual name. And fuck it hurts.

im a quitter

(D) I’m a quitter. I didn’t like the kink scene so I quit it. For a while this made perfect sense but recently I’m realizing how awful that actually was. The community doesn’t just exist. It is a group-made institution that is frequently shifting and growing with the contributions of many different leaders. There is nothing about my personality that screams ‘leader’ however I didn’t even try to fix the holes that I saw in the scene. I was hurt by them and I left. This is where I was wrong. I can’t expect a community to change to my ideals if I don’t put them on the table. At this point I’m so removed from the kink scene that even writing this article is intrusive. I think sometimes of going back and being louder about my qualms. But if I stay a quitter forever then at least I hope I inspire someone else to either help the nyc kink community or whatever community that they belong to.

Like this:

I can tell that he is trying to hide something but it isn’t going to work. He can’t. The truth comes out in his addiction and I’m a part of them.

For instance; when he orgasms his complexion gradients into a panicked eggshell merged with rageful scarlet. I watch the anxious composure of my lover, companion, guardian melt away and turn into swelling vice.

And when he is trying to hold back he claws into my back. I feel the stingy warm sensation, my masochist is fucked just right, but my intellect doesn’t skip this beat.

And my ear is placed right in between his lip and throat where I observe his exclamations as they slither up his diaphragm and easily escape out of his expanded mouth into my ear. I hear a crescendo of the typical grunts and moans but also that drown out booming growl.

Sublimity. Sublime. Sub-lime. The word is thick like molasses. When we kiss I’m doing something. My tongue rolls around it, my spit absorbs it, and my mouth tries to transfer to him the intrigue, beauty, and hope that swirls and swells, like the famous tornado filled with wreckage, fairy tales, and memories, inside of me.

I wonder if he really thought that I am not aware of this; my foolishness only stretches so far. Not only am I aware but I’m obsessed. Ritually I whisper, who is he, when his cock fills my mouth, my lip glosses in cum, and my senses are enlightened with a moment of honesty.

I dislike the notion that I like feminine things because I am a girl. Though there probably has been some estrogen influence in my gender I do not think that my vagina excretes a longing for puppies and romcoms.

I love wearing skirts! Dresses! Tights! I go to a store and don’t even really see the boy section. It isn’t that I dress this way because I’m a girl and I have to wear female clothes but because I truly dislike boy clothes. It is bland and boring and girl clothes are creative, diverse, and exciting.

This one is kind of complicated but in the kink scene there is a whole culture based on age play. Age play is relationships or scene (scenes are a specific period of kink activity) where the pretended age dynamic is fetishized. In my recent relationship I am a little and my partner is a Big. What that means is that I play the young child complimented by my partner’s role of the adult and parent. That probably seemed random but I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and would say that my age fluidity is a part of my gender construction and why I reject being called femme. When I think of femme I think of proudly worn and plump rouge lips, bold black eyelashes, pumps on pedicured feet or in a designer purse, smooth nails, on a women that is on their way to a bikini waxing. I am a little-girl way more often then I am femme. I express my femininity by coloring pictures of cute animals, dressing up as a princess, and picking pink before all the other colors.

Probably my first fetish was having a silicone dick which was a realistic way for my high schools self to envision the possibility of getting a real dick, which I really felt I needed. Nowadays I like having a cunt a lottttt but at one point I genuinely didn’t. I guess it was some high school phase for me but I can’t deny that it didn’t exist; it is integrated in my gender’s history.

Just because I’m feminine does not mean I’m a girl. I have been recently trying to figure out why I am a feminine girl sometimes and a feminine boy at other times. I guess the possibility that sometimes my gender flows into a flamboyant feminine male turns me on and makes me feel excited about my gender– it gives me peace of mind, which is really what most gender definition is about. Other times, I feel my gender flowing into an innocent girl child, and most recently I have been exploring being a dominant and seductive by reenacting the confident dark femme-fetale, which has been really exciting for me. And other times I flow to a person who’s gender doesn’t really have anything to say about their personality at all.

Also, I find that how feminine I am really depends on who I compare myself to and what kind of definition of feminine I am using. To expand, when I’m in the androgynous queer kink scene I feel REALLY cisgendered. Like ‘oh why don’t I think I’m cis, I’m so normative compared to everyone’. But when I’m with my family, which has a more traditional housewife idea of feminine, I feel really masculine and really groundbreaking for going to college and preparing a lifestyle independent from the possibility of having a long-term partner (/“husband”). So my gender tends to be constructed on a compare/contrast basis.

I am working through my gender’s quirks and build so there is still some exploration going on. I wouldn’t say that I have fully figured out my gender but these points are the body of it so far. On the other hand, I like female pronouns. I don’t really get insulted when people call me cis. I’m not really sure that I’m not cis. I know that calling myself trans can be a bit of a stretch. I’m kind of confused in the cisgendered/transgendered binary– cisgendered being someone who agrees with the gender that was assigned to them at birth and transgendered being someone who does not . I wouldn’t say that I disagree with being a women but I do disagree with the idea that my gender complexity ends with me being a women. I also disagree with the notion that because I am a woman most of the time I cannot have my own gender history, fluidity, and individual fingerprint.

Our first date was at a STI clinic– it was pretty loud declaration on what our interest and hobbies were yet I still was surprised when he asked me back to his neighborhood after. I’m so naive; where did I think this was going to go, really.

Skip to me scared, on my back, stretched wide, moaning and grinding. But actively keeping my eyes to the side; I didn’t want to make any eye-contact. I was intimidated by what I could be walking into, who is this person, why am I doing this, but at the same time, the fingers buried into my mound were pounding me, turning me on, almost making me forget my anxiety.

His hand still inside me, he readjusts himself, face angled to mine, mouth brushed my cheek down to my lips, I made a move and sucked on his lower lip— why did I do that?

One hand lied on my throat —is this a threat? and the other left my cunt and brushed up my back, scratched my neck. I squirmed into him. He smelt like lavender leaves but also like crisp post-rain air. They make expensive lotions out of his scent. I wanted to sneak another sniff because it relaxed me but I decided against it. Why do I even want to remember what he smells like? What is his purpose is to me, and I to him, will I have one later if I don’t now?

My tongue started to enter into his mouth and I almost got carried away until I started getting some perspective on where I have to be.

I released to mumble “What time is it? It must be time?” It was. Class started in 45, it was time for me to get going. I escaped onto a J train and allowed my brain to squeeze out the anxieties and questions I gathered this morning. I was unsure why I got so scared anyway. He is a good guy, or a good enough guy, I knew his girlfriend and my boyfriend knew him. They both wouldn’t encourage this if he didn’t understand consent. I enjoyed that, and he didn’t push it too far, I was always in control, why do I get so scared, why do I think horrible things are going to happen to me?

I didn’t ask Josh Rollins to help me. I didn’t ask him to own me. I didn’t really ask him anything. It was the following week and we were sitting on his balcony, blowing hookah into each others faces, and he told me that he feels like taking me in. And like a stray, bribed by curiosity, I stayed with him. I have previously trained to be a slave but I never had a training that was about self-improvement before anything else. I liked the idea of being a student and have been wanting to figure out a way to make a relationship out of Teacher/student scenes, and this was an interesting angle to it.

Though he took me in shortly after our first date, he did not touch me. It was actually a month before we touched each other again. There hasn’t even been a peck in the mean time. We have discussed sex but we don’t do it. He told me it was up to me, that he’s horny and ready to go but it was up to me to take the initiative.

It took me a month to figure out how to do that and get the courage to ask him to invite me over for the night. We met outside of Hunter College and popped onto the 6 train and talked about who the fuck knows what but eventually made it to his place.

I entered and undressed— that was the rule he has created for me, to undress as soon as I get into his apartment. Looking back it was impressive that Josh Rollins was able to handle me nakedly walking around his apartment once or twice a week for a month and was able to restrain himself from any sort of initiation.

We went into his room to watch a movie which was soon interrupted by an abrasive phone call from my mother that was overtly suspicious and inquisitive. It ended with her being pretty livid at me which made me visibly upset. I went into his room and plopped on the other side of his bed and tried to brush it off, he held me to comfort me and that’s when I decided to fuck all and suck lip. From lip to neck. From neck to sternum, chest, down his stomach, and then I willingly took his dick into my mouth, the precise act that I was scared he would force onto me was what I was horny over.

Fuck we are both overly kinesthetic— probably because we are so quiet so screaming out what we want is unlikely. But touching each other was quite simple. He pinched my nipples and licked my clit. I sucked his chest and grabbed his shaft.

I felt like I gained a superpower when I learned how to initiate though this is probably just basic sexual competence, nevertheless, Josh Rollins first experiment was a success.